John Mauran
John Lawrence Mauran, FAIA (1866–1933) was an American architect responsible for many downtown landmarks in St. Louis, Missouri. He was also active in Wisconsin and Texas.
Life[edit]
Mauran was born in Providence, Rhode Island and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1885 through 1889, under the French-American educator Eugene Letang. While there, he was a member of the fraternity of Delta Psi St. Anthony Hall).[1]
Work[edit]
Stylistically versatile through its decades of activity, Mauran's office was more commercially than artistically oriented, with work concentrated in the St. Louis area and a large number of hotel commissions in Texas. The St. Louis high-rises of the 1900s and 1910s show a clear influence from the Sullivan skyscrapers they stand next to, like the Wainwright Building, without Sullivan's distinctive ornament.
The stripped-classical style of the St. Louis Soldiers' Memorial, in 1939 a late example of its kind, is appropriate for its civic presence. Like other public buildings in the downtown Civic Plaza, the initial plans were far more elaborate, before delay and budget pressures left the actual results simplified and scaled down.
W.O. Mullgardt joined the firm in 1930. When Mauran died in 1933, this left William Crowell as its principal designer. The modernist 1941 Post-Dispatch Printing Plant, with its long ribbons of windows, preceded other International Style buildings in St. Louis by about nine years. This was the firm's final major work.